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Friday Fun Facts – Dear crowdSPRING Buyer….

As a small business startup we spend a great deal of time looking at and analyzing data to help us drive strategy, make adjustments, and better understand our customers. We try hard to not be robotic in our response to numbers, but rather to let them inform our decisions and our direction. Here is the latest in a serial discussion of some of the data we look at internally…

Dear crowdSPRING Buyer,

We’ve been looking around the site and see that there are still a few of you out there who are not getting the great design you came to crowdSPRING for. We know that there are a number of you (albeit a small number) who have asked for a refund because your project did not get the traffic it probably deserved. We want to help. We’re here to help. Matter of fact, we will dance a tango on national television with Steve Wozniak if that will help.

I took a look at some of the data on failed projects (refunded, that is) to try to get a better handle on ways to improve the odds and reduce your chance of leaving here without the design you came for in the first place. We have all been doing a pretty good job at reducing the number consistently since we launched, but we want to do better. Here’s what I learned when I looked at some of the numbers: in the first 10 weeks after we launched the percentage of projects refunded averaged 11.1% of all completed projects. For the last 10 weeks that average has dropped to 3.8%! But I still think we can do better.

Here are two interesting facts based on data from the past 3 months:

The average number of creatives participating in successful projects was 27. The average for refunded projects? 6. What this tells us is that buyers who do a better job of attracting creatives to their project will succeed more often. How to do this? Well, first of all write a great brief. Make your project sexy, exciting, glamorous! The kind of project that 27 creatives will want to participate in. We can help here – download this template when you post your project and ask us for help! We can really give you some good pointers on making your brief that best it can be.

The average number of comments left by buyers in successful projects was 32. In refunded projects? A sad, sad 4.6. The message here is clear: buyers who engage the creatives in their projects not only get better entries, they get more entries, more creatives and they leave crowdSPRING with much larger smiles on their faces.

So, dear Buyer, what is the lesson here? Write a great brief, and don’t be shy about asking for help. And once your project is underway, score every entry, and leave as much feedback as you possibly can. The first tip is what will attract creatives to your project and the second is what will keep them there.